Wolf on a String Read online

  The years he had spent as a youth under the chilly fostership of his uncle King Philip of Spain—how could I, a foster child myself, be other than sympathetic?—had left a deep mark upon Rudolf. Life at the palace of El Escorial was an endless round of prayer and penance, while the manners he was required to observe at court were stiff, austere, and cold. All this had dulled—more, had damaged—the sensitivity of his soul, and his only defense was to fashion for himself a mask of imperious pride that he could present to the world.

  Yet he was, as I can attest, an enlightened prince, one whose mind was ever open to the endless variety of people and things. He knew well the evil that fanaticism wreaks, and on more than one occasion told me, with a shudder, of the day King Philip insisted on taking him to witness an auto-da-fé in Toledo, when a band of Lutheran heretics were herded to the stake and burnt alive. Never would he forget, he assured me, the stench of human flesh being consumed in those flames.

  The daylight was steadily fading as the dusk came on. Billows of snow blundered softly against the stained-glass windowpanes. The house all round was still and silent. The old woman struggled to her feet, with a weary groan, and shuffled out. The fire crackled and spat. The hound, which was old and infirm, could not stay awake and soon dropped its great head to the floor with a thud. Its pelt gave off a brownish, biscuity odor, warm and not unpleasant; it seemed to me, I am not sure why, the very smell of childhood itself. The Emperor touched the animal’s back with the toe of one of his black calfskin slippers. The beast lifted its head from the floor and looked at him, then laid it down again, with another soft thump.

  “The Englishman Dee,” Rudolf said, “could change himself into the form of a dog—did you know that? Oh, yes. Many a night he was seen in that wise, racing through the streets of the Old Town, when he first came to Prague and lodged with our former physician Dr. Hájek. Much magic was done there, at the House of the Green Mound.”

  He laughed quietly, shaking his head.

  “What a saucy rogue he was,” he said, “that Johannes Dee. When we first summoned him he arrived before us an hour late, and instead of begging our pardon, he fell straight off to rebuking us for our sins! God had pledged to him, he said, that if we renounced our wicked ways—our wicked ways!—our power would be the greatest the earth has ever known, and that we should make the Devil our prisoner, which Devil he did conjecture to be the Great Turk. Ha.”

  He was silent for a moment, still shaking his head, still wryly amused. I was greatly taken by his antiquated mode of speaking, and the slight trace of a Castilian accent. The dog, asleep already, twitched and moaned, dreaming no doubt of the days of glory when it brought countless antlered behemoths tumbling in their blood to the dust. I have always been curious about the inner life of animals, and meant to make a study of it, in fact, but the years caught up with me. So many things left undone, my investigation of the animal brain the least of them.

  “We did not know,” the Emperor said, “whether to have the fellow flogged for his insolence or set him up as our chief wizard, as Elizabeth of England had done. He claimed to converse with angels, one of them a young girl who spoke to him in his own tongue and also in Greek and bade him write down the things she said. Also he had a shewstone, a black, polished round he claimed was given to him by the archangel Uriel, in which his assistant Kelley, that benighted creature, did his crystal gazing for him.” Suddenly he turned his head and peered closely into my face. “Tell us, young sir, have you ever conversed with an angel?”

  “No, my lord,” I said, “I have not.”

  It was at once obvious I had answered too swiftly and with too much candor, for something dimmed in Rudolf’s eyes, and he sat back on the couch, and although he was nodding his head it seemed rather that he was shaking it, in sad disappointment. I cursed myself for my rashness: I might as easily have assured him I was in frequent communication with whole choirs of angels. Always tell the great ones what they want to hear, that’s another of my mottoes, though at that time I had not yet formulated it, if for no other reason than that I had as yet encountered no one I could count great, except, now, amazingly, this one, the greatest of all.

  After a moment or two I was relieved to see the Emperor’s darkened mood passing, for he smiled again, and even, to my surprise and no little consternation, laid a hand against my cheek, with such sudden intimacy and seeming fondness that I had a hard job of it not to flinch away from his touch. His palm was soft and plump and warm and slightly moist. I may say that had any other man dared to caress me in such a fashion I would have slapped him for a fawning man-girl.

  “Ah, well, you are young,” he said, “and no doubt you will grow rapidly into much new knowledge of matters both angelic and mundane. I was your age when I inherited the empire.” He smiled, and patted my cheek, lightly, with that soft, silky palm. “For now, you shall be our talisman, our charm, our new-risen star!”

  The touch of his hand had made me tense, and I sat as still as a statue, hardly daring to breathe. Rudolf now slumped again into despondency, lowering his great chin until it crushed the lace ruff and sank down into the velvet material of his coat.

  When he spoke, his voice was faint, yet plangent with a sudden onrush of anguish.

  “Oh, young man, young man,” he said. “I know that I am dead and damned, for my spirit is possessed by Evil.”

  This sudden, strange outburst filled me with alarm and dismay. What was the cause of such a blurted, horrified confession? And what was it he was confessing to?

  On the floor the dog whined and panted in its sleep, surely dreaming again of the hunt.

  “I don’t understand you, my lord,” I said. “Why should you be damned, what is this evil that you think possesses you?”

  He looked at me with stricken, starting eyes, and for a moment I saw him clearly as he must once have been, long ago: frightened, lonely, and lost in the vast, hushed, and sunless palace of the Spanish King.

  “I have done terrible things,” he said, his voice shaking. “I have plunged myself into the darkest of the dark arts, into goety and black magic and the worst of witchcraft. Listen”—here he leaned forward urgently, coming so close that I felt his breath on my face—“I employed the Picatrix, that magic handbook of the Arabians, to cast a spell on my brother Matthias, whom I hate. I had Dee and his man Kelley call up spirits out of the deep who would aid me in my pursuit of the philosopher’s stone. Once I saw the Evil One himself, face to face, as you and I are now. Oh, yes.”

  He turned his tormented gaze to the fire and its flames, and it was as if he were seeing devils dancing there.

  “A child was born, somewhere in Styria,” he said, speaking in the lowest, most horrified whisper now, “and news of it was carried to the castle, a boy-child that came out of its mother’s womb with a golden tooth already fully grown. I sent for the creature to be brought to me, that I might inspect it, but the captain of the guard, a hapless dolt, misunderstood his orders and carried back to me instead the infant’s severed head. It had no gold tooth.”

  He stopped, and sat trembling, fingering agitatedly the stuff of his cape. I could hear him breathing, taking in slow deep draughts of air and sounding for all the world like a dying man entering upon his last agony. The dog, sensing distress, woke from sleep and lifted its great carven head and looked up somberly again at the suffering man.

  “My lord,” I said earnestly, “you must remember, God is willing to forgive all sins, even the blackest.”

  Rudolf continued silent for a moment, but then drew himself suddenly upright, lifting that bearded, pendulous chin, his nostrils dilating and his moist lip thrusting itself out. His expression had turned in an instant to one of haughty disdain.

  “We do not believe in God,” he said, in a new voice, strong, full, deep, and solemn. “Neither in Man, nor in God, have we the slightest speck of faith. The world is all wickedness and folly, and Heaven and Hell a lie told to soothe or frighten us.”

  He rose from where he
was seated and paced to the hearth. He had a heavy woman’s way of walking, slouching from side to side, letting his weight fall on one hip and then the other. Still his gaze was fixed on the flames, seeing there again perhaps a presentiment of the Abyss but seeming, this time, to scorn it and its attendant demons.

  “We have a task for you,” he said, without turning.

  I too rose from the couch and crossed to the fireplace and stood next to him. In that moment I felt as protective towards him as if I were his son. He did not look at me.

  I said that whatever task he might think to entrust me with, I would fulfill it with the greatest diligence and care.

  Now he did turn; now he did meet my eye.

  “There is no one we can trust,” he said. “We are surrounded by schemers and knaves. Our courtiers prey upon us like leeches, sucking our life-blood.” He shuffled a step forward and stood again close up before me, gazing searchingly into my face.

  “But now you have come to us, Christian Stern,” he said. “You have come to us out of a dream. Tell me: are you a phantom, or are you real?”

  “I am real, my lord,” I said, “as real as this floor we stand on, as real as those flames.”

  He went on peering at me, now stroking his fat lower lip between a finger and a thumb.

  “Shall we trust you, our visitor from beyond the crystal spheres?” he said, more to himself, it seemed, than to me.

  “You may trust me in all things, sir,” I answered, in a strong, steady voice that I judged suitable to the weight of the moment. “I am ready to swear an oath of loyalty if you should—”

  “Nonsense!” Rudolf snapped, but without anger, so it appeared, and almost, to my amazement, laughing. “We have oaths sworn to us by the dozen every day, and to what end? We are everywhere scorned, tricked, traduced. Listen, listen”—he took me by the arm and led me to the couch and made me sit at his side again—“tell us what you think of my officials, those you have so far encountered. What of Wenzel, our High Steward, what have you to say of him? The fool imprisoned you and we might not have known you had come had not the jailer thought to report your presence to the Chamberlain. What do you say of him, our Chamberlain, Master Lang?”

  I hesitated. How was I to answer these questions? What further new test was this?

  “I think, my lord,” I said slowly and with care, “I think that both the men you mention acted as they believed would serve Your Majesty’s best interests. There was great agitation everywhere, panic, alarms. The unfortunate lady, Dr. Kroll’s daughter—”

  “Yes yes,” Rudolf said again, impatiently, “we know all that. But our best interests are their best interests first—that they know.”

  He let go of my arm, which since we sat down he had been holding on to with an urgent grip. He peered about the room with narrowed eyes, as if there might be others there, secret listeners, lurking in the shadows.

  “Wenzel,” he murmured, “yes, Wenzel. He is too much of the Protestant party, while Lang lives in the ear of the Vatican. Lang and the Nuncio from Rome, Malaspina, are a pair of Machiavels, and conspire together, we know that well. They are all conspirators, all of them!”

  He stopped, and said nothing more for some moments, but making a strange sound under his breath, a kind of droning, wordless mutter. The dog, sitting up now and watching him with grave attentiveness, shifted its mighty haunches, its nails clattering on the wooden floor.

  The last of the afternoon’s light was shrinking fast in the windows. The fire sizzled.

  Suddenly Rudolf seized my arm again.

  “You, Christian Stern,” he said, the flames reflected in his eyes, “you are the one we shall put our trust in, you are the one who will act for us against all the plotters and the spies with whom we are trammeled about. We ask of you what we would ask of no other.”

  I waited, trembling a little before those eyes, which burned into mine with such fierce entreaty.

  “I am ready, my lord,” I said, “to do whatever you ask of me.”

  Still he kept me fixed with that burning stare, while his fingers dug themselves deeper into the flesh of my arm. He drew me near to him and again made me lean down, so that he could put his face close up to the side of mine, with his lips almost against my ear. I smelled again the faintly fetid odor of his breath.

  “Find,” he whispered hoarsely, “find who it was that so cruelly destroyed the Lady Magdalena. She was dear to us, she was our beloved, precious one. Discover her destroyer. That will be your task.”

  There was a long silence, save for the hissing of the fire and the snow’s faint whispering against the window. Then all at once the hound lifted high its great head and opened its jaws and delivered itself of a slow, soft, drawn-out howl.

  “Ah, Schnorr,” the Emperor said, laying a hand fondly on the creature’s head. He turned to me again. “You see? Schnorr knows—he knows.”

  8

  After that momentous, hardly to be credited, yet ambiguous and troubling encounter, there followed an irksome interval of empty days before I was to find myself again in His Majesty’s presence. Yet if I was impatient, I had to admit I was thankful too for this period of respite. The task His Majesty had set me, to discover the murderer of Magdalena Kroll, was a heavy weight on my thoughts and a heavier burden on my heart. The lightning-flash frights I had suffered in the immediate wake of my discovery of her corpse had left me in a state of unshakable fear that affected me like an ague, darkening my days and haunting my dreams at night. I had made my way to Prague determined to find a place in Rudolf’s favor, and had succeeded beyond my most fantastical hopes; but if ever proof were needed of the old warning to beware the getting of what you wish for, I was assuredly it.

  I had not the least notion how to go about the business of tracking down the girl’s killer. Where should I begin? What matters should I look into? Whom was I to question? I was a scholar of natural philosophy, not an investigator of crimes. Barely arrived in Prague, I knew next to nothing of the city’s secrets and intrigues. All the same, I was convinced that causes of the young woman’s death lay deep in the tangled affairs of court.

  Her corpse had been examined by Dr. Kroll himself—what a task that must have been!—who had established that she had not been ravished before being so brutally put to death. Nor had she been robbed of any of her possessions: the gold medallion and some gold coins of no little value that she had in a purse in a pocket of her gown had not been touched.

  No rape, no theft—what, then, had been the motive for her murder?

  Behind these questions, and pressing upon me as urgently as any of them, was the matter of what would happen if I failed in this commission that had been laid upon my inexperienced shoulders. Yet again I was assailed by the memory of the fat sentry, that poor harmless fellow, strung up in the castle yard, his dangling limbs, his empurpled visage, that awful apple-like thing wedged in the gaping round of his mouth. They could hang me too, and just as briskly, should my capricious royal patron change his mind and decide that I was after all of no more significance in his firmament than a shooting star.

  Needing to begin somewhere, I sought out the cadaverous guard who had appeared out of the snowy darkness that night to relieve his soon to be hanged counterpart. I was told, however, that he had fled the city, which, if true, was surely the wisest thing he could have done.

  Next I requested a meeting with the Emperor’s High Steward, Felix Wenzel. What I might say to him I did not know, but I confess it would have been gratifying to flaunt myself before him in my suddenly reversed role of royal confidant. However, he did not even respond to my request. This, I managed to persuade myself, was not so much a mark of his contempt for me as a sign of his alarm: it was he, after all, who had so impetuously imprisoned His Imperial Majesty’s God-sent star.

  I also dispatched a note to Chamberlain Lang, asking if he would speak to me and answer some queries. Unlike Wenzel, he replied immediately, in fulsome terms, saying he would be only too eager to offer me
every possible help—except that he had business to attend to on behalf of the Emperor which would take him away from the city for some days.

  I knew above all that the person I should question was Jan Madek, the young man to whom Magdalena Kroll had been betrothed before she was snatched from him by the Emperor. But Madek, as I knew, had vanished, and no one could say where he might be found.

  The only distraction I had from my worries was the funny little house in Golden Lane. The task of settling myself there was greatly if mysteriously eased when straight off I began to be supplied, as if by magic, with all the necessities of life: a store of victuals, a keg of wine, warm bedding, linen, firewood, and the like. Obviously the directive had been handed down by someone—Chamberlain Lang, so I assumed—that I was a person of consequence and was to be treated accordingly.

  But here is the odd thing: I was never in the house, not once, when these supplies were being deposited there. I would come back from one of my long, exploratory rambles about the city—the foul weather persisted, but I was becoming accustomed to the freezing mist in the air and the frozen snow underfoot—to find a baked chicken, say, still warm, in a covered dish on the table, or a bale of fagots beside the hearth, or a fine new silver drinking cup hanging by its handle from a nail above the stove. Yet I found nothing to show how they had come to be there, or who had left them. It was as if a secret sentinel had been set to keep watch on my comings and goings, who when he saw me leaving the house would flash a signal to a likewise hidden band of carriers, that they might hurriedly enter the house and make their clandestine deliveries and be gone as tracelessly as they had come. But who were they, and how had they gained entry? They must have had a key to my front door—who would have given it to them, and what was the purpose of such secrecy?